Far From Dogging It: the Scintillating Amores Perros

From the first gun, almost literally, Amores Perros drops us into a car chase that hatches, haunts and invents the rest of the film.

We don't know the people rushing through the streets of Mexico City, or why one set wants to kill the other (in movies nowadays, if you don't want to kill someone, you're not a very important character.). We only know that the young man bowling his car through the stuffed traffic desperately wants to keep his bleeding dog comfy in the back seat.

So begins the new Mexican film, the exceptional debut of director Alejandro Gonzalez Iquirritu set in the hyperreal, hyperviolent underlife of Mexico City, the gateway of the new Globalist age. Family is dead, cash is king and love is best kept to the dogs.

The film tells three tales linked to the car chase. In the first vignette, young Octavio falls in love with his pregnant sister-in-law and dreams of running away with her. His brutal brother Ramiro bags groceries by day and bags robbery loot by night. After the family rottweiler Cofi ravages another dog on the streets, Octavio decides to fund his venture by turning the house dog into a cash cow, entering him in illegal dogfights for quick money.

The middle vignette shifts to Daniel, a successful magazine executive who leaves his wife and kids for Valeria, a rising model whose image hogs every billboard glimpsed through the Mexico City smog. Unknown to the newly freed and newly doomed Daniel, his girlfriend is having a love affair with her precious Lhasa Apso, in a, ahem, g-rated manner of speaking. The house begins to collapse and the shiny new life rots, with a little help from a bad spot of gangrene.

The third story follows El Chivo, a college-professor, turned revolutionary, back from the jungle and living in a new wilderness. A scraggly old man past his Che-loving prime, he survives on the streets by assassinating businessmen, turning the death arts that he learned for Marxist revolution into an entrepreneurial profession, feeding off the social decay of the cell phone society. El Chivo manufactures a family out of a group of strays to replace the wife and daughter he left behind. The film explores his regrets and reservations while he plans a hit meant as an unholy hola from one half-brother to another.

All the way, characters strand their love and express their desires- violence, escape, regret and forgiveness --- through their four-legged friends, who seem to be more trustworthy, though insufficient, depositories
than the humans they replace.

In terms of style, the film owes a large debt to the Dogma movement, with tight, hand-held camera work and natural lighting. Even though it doesn't completely follow Dogma principles, it adheres closely enough to satisfy
those who think Hollywood must be stopped.

The script does a terrific job of being literary without violating cinematic sensibility or the character-driven integrity. The characters talk as they would talk,
even when characters of dubious education make literate observations.

The film has been called a Mexican Pulp Fiction, mainly by people who need to look past the new release section every so often. While the two follow the same pattern of interweaving stories--- hold your ears, Tarantino fans ---
dear Quentin did not invent the technique. More importantly, while interweaving in Pulp Fiction mainly works as a gimmick, the interweaving in Amores Perros produces tension and ironic effect (Remember that one of the youths really wants to run into a model.).

The film more greatly resembles Paul Thomas' Anderson's Magnolia and its detailing of the fractured families that undergird Southern Californian tinsel. However, Amores Perros takes most heart from Krystof Kieslowski's Trois Coleurs trilogy, a proposal bolstered by several obvious visual homages. Those films deal with the complications arising from the ideals of liberty, equality and
brotherhood, the first principles of the French Revolution. While those films massage out pithy intellectual points that brew from an urbane Parisian landscape, Amores Perros twists the same themes into nauseous truths that bite and foil.

It is an exploration of values set at the foot of a new
revolution, one that may be leading us into an uneasy age.